74 OUR BROTHER CHAUCER 



of their frames or books; they are of flesh and blood, 

 and I am walking among them as among old friends 

 and acquaintances. But where is Shakespeare all the 

 time ? I find him not, in spite of all the loud trium- 

 phant shouts of those who have discovered him in 

 this or that character and exposed his true inwardness 

 to the world. He hides from, he deludes, he mocks 

 us, until we come to regard him as a mythical being 

 or a demigod. 



Chaucer revealed himself in every one of his 

 creations, in every line he wrote. If he has a fault 

 as an artist it is that he is too human; the sense of 

 kinship, of brotherhood, is, however, more to me 

 than artistry, even of the godlike aloofness of 

 Shakespeare. Can we in all our literature find 

 one like him in this, a blood relation to all men, 

 good or bad, from the lowest human refuse to the 

 highest, the kingly and saintly ? He is one of them 

 always, and eats and drinks and laughs and weeps 

 and prays with them. All the others whose works 

 are a joy for ever are now dead — dead and 

 gone, alas! we know it when we read them. Even 

 great Shakespeare and his fellow-Elizabethans, with 

 all those who came after — the heroic, the fantastic, 

 the metaphysical, with their tantalising, fascinating 

 conceits: and succeeding them, the smooth, the 

 elegant, the classical, who reigned a hundred years: 

 then the revolting romantics in a more than cen- 

 tury-long procession down even to the spasmodics, 

 whose Balders, Festuses and Aurora Leighs our one 

 immortal critic would have described as a relapse into 



